White House in crisis mode

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WASHINGTON President Barack Obama was seething. Two weeks after the disastrous launch of
healthcare.gov, Obama gathered his senior staff members in the Oval Office for what one aide recalled as an “unsparing” dressing-down.

The public accepts that technology sometimes fails, the president said, but he had personally trumpeted that the federal website for insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act would be ready Oct. 1, and it wasn't.

“If I had known,” Obama said, according to the aide, “we could have delayed the website.”

Obama's anger, described by a White House that has repeatedly sought to show that the president was unaware of the extent of the website's problems, has lit a fire under the West Wing staff. Senior aides are racing to make sure the website is fixed by the end of the month as they confront the political fallout from presidential promises, now broken, that all Americans who liked their existing health care plans could keep them.

Inside the White House, there is anxiety that if the health care problems are not righted, they could imperil the rest of Obama's presidency, especially as criticism grows that the president misled consumers about the plan. Obama sought to tamp down that criticism by apologizing Thursday in an interview with NBC News. “I am sorry that they, you know, are finding themselves in this situation, based on assurances they got from me,” the president said.

Denis McDonough, the White House chief of staff, is in charge of damage control. He leads a health care conference call at 7 p.m. daily, just before a written update on the broken website is inserted into the briefing book that is delivered to Obama in the White House residence. McDonough is also the primary conduit to angry Democratic lawmakers who are seeking to delay parts of the law and extend the enrollment period until the problems are fixed.

Some Democrats close to the White House, however, think that the administration is not sufficiently panicked by the health care problems and urgently needs to step up its response. They say that the president and his staff do not recognize the full threat to his legacy, and they worry that Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, is not equipped to pull the administration out of the morass.

“They are going to have to start thinking about some options,” said one Obama ally familiar with internal operations at the White House. “They need to get ahead of it somehow.”

Geoffrey Garin, a top pollster with close ties to the administration, said that although “it is not in their nature to panic,” White House aides “understand that panic elsewhere can create its own vortex,” especially among Democratic lawmakers who face re-election next year.

“I'm livid that this screw-up actually plays into the hands of the critics,” said Rep. Gerald Connolly, D-Va., referring to Republican plans to use the bungled health care rollout as ammunition in 2014.

Pressure to demonstrate visible action helped lead the president to appoint Jeffrey D. Zients, the former head of the Office of Management and Budget, to orchestrate the website's repair. Working with private-sector technology whiz kids out of a makeshift “war room” in Herndon, Va., Zients has pledged a workable website by the end of the month.

Other allies of the president are urging the White House not to let Obama get swallowed up by the health care issue the way that the BP oil spill crisis in the summer of 2010 pushed aside virtually everything else.

“They have made a strategic decision that they can't let this become like BP – the only story out there forever,” said one Democratic ally who has talked with senior White House staff members in recent days. “There are other things that they are going to push forward.”

In a speech at the Port of New Orleans on Friday, Obama nudged both parties to stop throwing up roadblocks to jobs and economic progress; one example he cites was the partial government shutdown last month.

Obama said the U.S. must embrace ideas with bipartisan support, like technology, roads and schools – and some without, like his unpopular health care law. The alternative, Obama said, is to fall further and further behind competitors like Europe and China.

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